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Law of Truly Large Numbers


With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen (Diaconis and Mosteller 1989). Littlewood (1986) considered an event which occurs one in a million times to be "surprising." Taking this definition, close to 100000 surprising events are "expected" each year in the United States alone and, in the world at large, "we can be absolutely sure that we will see incredibly remarkable events" (Diaconis and Mosteller 1989).


See also

Coincidence, Frivolous Theorem of Arithmetic, Strong Law of Large Numbers, Strong Law of Small Numbers

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References

Diaconis, P. and Mosteller, F. "Methods of Studying Coincidences." J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 84, 853-861, 1989.Littlewood, J. E. Littlewood's Miscellany. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

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Law of Truly Large Numbers

Cite this as:

Weisstein, Eric W. "Law of Truly Large Numbers." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/LawofTrulyLargeNumbers.html

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